The American people have long opposed abortion, same sex “marriage,” universal, socialistic health care and a host of other ultraliberal causes; current polls confirm we still do. But the waterboarding began, literally, within the first three days of this new administration. With no instigation from Congress, the freshman president picked up his new hose of authority and, by executive order, overturned the long-standing Reagan-era regulations prohibiting foreign aid going to organizations that finance overseas abortions – and handed international Planned Parenthood, chief provider of abortions worldwide, 200 million taxpayer dollars!
And now, while we’re strapped down by the Democrat-controlled Congress, gasping and gulping beneath a flood of strong-arm tactics, the “health reform” bill taking shape outlines a “minimum-benefits package” that will be universal – that is, required of every American’s insurance plan, whether provided by a private firm or by the government.
Cunningly, abortion isn’t specifically mentioned, but will be decided by a “Health Benefits Advisory Committee,” handpicked by the president and his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who already has a record while governor of Kansas supporting late-term abortions! See how this “taking advantage of a crisis” thing works?
But we’re not helpless yet, folks. We’re drenched and near-drowned and gasping for breath, but there’s a growing coalition of staunch Republican and “blue dog” Democrats in both houses of Congress digging in their heels and saying, “Wait! This is all too much, too fast! We need time to read and digest and consider this torrent of legislation. Mr. President, hold off!”
And that gives us debt-soaked citizens a chance to rise up and gasp and spit and shout: “MR. PRESIDENT, AND YOU, TOO, CONGRESS! YOU WORK FOR US! NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND! WE VOTED YOU IN! AND WE CAN TAKE YOU OUT! STOP THIS WATERBOARDING!!”
That excerpt stands alone, but you really need to read the whole thing — and World O Crap’s deconstruction — to fully grasp old Pat’s POV: The good waterboarding saved the Brooklyn Bridge while the bad waterboarding is universal health care. It’s hard to explain because, well, it’s insane. You have to read it for yourself.
Lois Romano Won’t Be Invited Back On Hardball Again
by dday
Chris Matthews unsurprisingly opened his maw and had Betsy McCaughey spoonfed bullshit into it today, repeating almost word-for-word McCaughey’s argument about end-of-life care in the health care bill.
MATTHEWS: Lois, your thoughts about this debate, it’s a provision in the Energy and Commerce version of the health care bill, Energy and Commerce Committee. It was put in, this provision by Earl Blumenauer from Oregon, there it stands, it’s a provision which allows you to get counseling every five years or so. I wonder what the hell this provision’s doing in a bill that’s aimed at people who are younger. It’s not about Medicare recipients, people over 65. Why are you going to be visited every five years by somebody to talk about how you want to die. I think it’s crazy this is in there, but your thoughts.
ROMANO: But it’s not in there. I mean basically-
MATTHEWS: It is in there!
(crosstalk)
MATTHEWS: It’s in the bill, it’s in the-
ROMANO: It’s a benefit! First of all, Chris, Chris. First of all, it’s an extension of a 1999 bill that was enacted during the Bush Administration, and it’s a self-determination, a patient’s rights bill. And all it really says is that Medicare will pay if someone wants to go in and have a consultation. It doesn’t say you have to have a consultation.
MATTHEWS: It’s not about Medicare, Lois, this is, we already have that in Medicare. This is about people under 65, younger people. This is not about Medicare, we’ve got it in that coverage, you’re saying that. This is about a health care bill to help people in their middle years, in their younger years. Why would you have this conversation with them?
I don’t know, Chris, because young people don’t have a force field around them, and sometimes they get stricken with terminal illness, and sometimes they get in car accidents, and sometimes they get in situations for end-of-life care comes into play, and they should be allowed to have a consultation about those issues covered by their health care plan.
Also fun: Matthews thinks this bill has nothing to do with Medicare, when major provisions include eliminating Medicare Advantage, the private insurers who charge individuals twice as much as the government and offer worse care to seniors; the IMAC provision to look at reimbursement rates in Medicare, Medicare internal cost savings, Medicaid coverage expansion, and about 20 other things to do with Medicare and Medicaid.
This goes on for about five minutes, with Tweety checking his crib sheet for Betsy McCaughey’s lies, and Romano fruitlessly trying to debunk them. He talks about “consultations on a recurring basis” and she yells “It’s not mandated!” and he says “Well, what’s it doing in there,” finally deciding that it was put in by a lobbyist (evil!). The Politico bobblehead chimes in with the kind of “teach the controversy” hands-off refereeing, saying that you see conservatives bringing this up because it “offers political fodder.” Yes, I imagine lying about the policy does offer political fodder, especially if people like Chris Matthews swallow those lies whole. At the end he demands, “Why is it in this bill!” Because health care policy should not be included in a health care bill. (“You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”) Romano replies, “Why not?” Matthews: “Because we’re talking about it.”
Mission accomplished, Betsy McCaughey. The 90s are back!
He did the same thing in the role of abortion policy in the health insurance exchanges, where he stumbled into something he knew absolutely nothing about, decided that offering the same reproductive coverage on a public option as is offered in 90% of all private plans was illegal under the Hyde Amendment, even though the public plan is self-sufficient and doesn’t access public funds, and decided that dirty liberals were ruining a good bill by throwing a “lefty wish list” into it and driving good solid moderates like him crazy.
Chris Matthews is a deeply stupid person. He knows absolutely nothing about policy, and picks up scraps from The Weekly Standard and people from the Hudson Institute and cocktail parties and fits it into his dishonest everyman pose. For every day he takes down a Birther there are 20 or 30 instances like this where he actively works to deny progress for America.
If most of our media didn’t exist, I’d have to say at this point people would be better informed.
…Rachel Maddow is very deliberately going through the Betsy McCaughey smear right now, calling her out as the head of a medical device company and part of a think tank funded by drugmakers, and said “Welcome to 1993.” Two hours earlier this dumbass Chris Matthews bought every word of it.
By the way, I want to take this opportunity to thank Andrew Sullivan, who edited The New Republic in 1993 and 1994 and was most responsible for giving Betsy McCaughey’s smears legitimacy, to our collective detriment to this day. Hey, appreciate it, Andrew!
Brilliant political observers and Village savants, Chris Matthews, Charlie Cook and Chuck Todd say the country has lost confidence in Obama and that the Dems could very well lose the congress next time. It seems to be the fault of the tax ‘n spend “redistributionist” liberal hippies and Obama needs to be much more responsive to the Blue Dogs, who hold the key to success if he will only seize it.
Cook says that Obama is already a failure because he didn’t do health care in a bipartisan fashion and that not enacting malpractice reform was his biggest mistake.
And Matthews says that Obama was racial profiling when he defended Henry Louis Gates. Later in the show he got very self-righteous about Beck calling Obama a racist. (Self-awareness isn’t Tweety’s strong suit.)
They’ve turned. If it weren’t for the Republicans acting like circus clowns, it would be even worse.
Update: Matthews also says that provisions that allow people to consult about living wills is a leftist plot (that has something to do with abortion, in his mind) and the right has good reason to object.
Harold Meyerson asks the fundamental question: who cares what Max Baucus and his band of finance committee nobodies thinks? By what measure should they be considered the last word on this?
Three committees have reported out bills plainly to Obama’s liking. These committees — two in the House, one in the Senate, and all controlled by progressive Democrats who support the president’s objectives — have backed mandates on individuals to get insurance and created generous subsidies to make that insurance affordable. They have backed mandates on employers (all but the smallest) to provide insurance or pay into a pool to fund those subsidies. And they have created a public plan, both to compete with private plans and to bring down the cost of health care more generally.
[…]
Over at Senate Finance, judging by the reports coming of the committee, a solonic gang of six — three Democrats, including chairman Max Baucus of Montana, and three Republicans, including ranking member Charles Grassley of Iowa — are turning out a bill whose resemblance to anything the president has championed is accidental and incidental. To secure Republican support, they oppose a public plan. To secure Republican support, they oppose employer mandates, even on the largest corporations. (And many of America’s biggest employers are retailers with a proven record of not providing coverage to their workers: Wal-Mart, our largest, employs 1.4 million Americans, most of whom it does not cover.) The solonic six may end up requiring employers to fund subsidies for employees who need them, but that could create the bureaucratic nightmare to end all bureaucratic nightmares — 700,000 Wal-Mart employees, say, bringing their tax returns to work so management can investigate (“You sure you reported all your income?”) and stall (“Doesn’t your spouse work at Home Depot? Why don’t they pay the subsidy?”) and investigate and stall.
Sounds like a plan to secure universal coverage by the middle of the next century.
The solonic six, in other words, seem on track to produce a plan that falls short of universal coverage, omits the savings that a competitive public plan would create, and might actually make health care harder to get. The only justification for such a bill is that it might win some Republican support. Why that is a goal worth pursuing at the expense of decent reform, however, is not at all apparent.
Well, just ask the Two DavesBoren and Broder and they’ll tell you that bipartisanship is always better — because it just is. It’s Goldilocks politics — one side is too hot, one side is too cold, so lukewarm corporate whores must be juuuuust right. They certainly can’t argue that it’s better politically, because everyone knows that Republicans will run against this legislation for the next half century at a minimum, and having three or four Senators vote for it won’t change that. It wouldn’t change if 25 GOP Senators voted for it.
Meyerson says that the Democrats can’t bargain with Republicans anymore because they are extremist nutjobs, which is true. But I don’t think that’s the problem. The real problem is the power of this faux “centrism” that’s been adopted by dwindling numbers of both parties who actually seem to be among the dullest and the least creative of a pretty dull and uncreative group. Which isn’t surprising. Centrism as currently constructed is nothing more than facile claptrap that says “the middle” is always right andf finding some arbitrary number that means absolutely nothing is somehow the “smart” way to govern. These centrists are actually intellectually lazy people who won’t (or can’t) judge ideas and policies on the merits, and instead adopt the easy attitude that something between the two poles is always superior. (I realize I’m making the assumption that these “centrists” don’t know what they are doing but I actually think they are pretty stupid and subject to flattery from their powerful, wealthy benefactors. They are tools not brains. Think George W. Bush in his compassionate conservative guise.)
The larger problem is that when applied to problems that actually need solving, these moderate positions are completely ineffectual, or actually make things worse. And this attitude is then adopted by the villagers as the sage and wise position because it saves them having to think too deeply about the issues or take a position that might tag them as being one of those awful partisans. Et voila — conventional wisdom is born.
At best, as Boren’s famous quote bears out, it’s nothing more than overweening moral vanity. These people think there is virtue in moderation for its own sake and take great pride in being above the usual “partisanship” or passions of hoi polloi. But in the end, it’s just another insider power play — those intellectually overrated “centrists” exert the outsized power they are given in our two party system in service of their massively inflated egos. The status quo is protected, the people are further disillusioned and the ruling class breathe a big sigh of relief.
I do agree with Meyerson about what Obama should do about it: he should ignore them. But I’ll be surprised if he does. Democratic presidents never do. Unsurprisingly, Republican presidents rarely have to.
Following tradition in signing major legislation, Mr. Bush used a different pen for each letter of his name, then handed the pens to Republican Congressional leaders and a few Democrats whose support was critical.
Among them was Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the new chairman of the Finance Committee, whose decision to reach a compromise between his own party’s more modest tax cut and Mr. Bush’s more ambitious one angered leaders in his own party, including the new majority leader, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota. But tonight Mr. Daschle was headed to the White House for a private dinner with Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, while Mr. Baucus said he did the right thing by striking a deal with Mr. Bush.
”Every day it looks like a better and better decision,” Mr. Baucus said at the White House after the signing ceremony. ”In many respects, I think politically I helped the party. We Democrats would have been in trouble in 2002 just saying no to every one of the president’s proposals.”
Update: It looks like Waxman got what he needed in the House — for this week, at least. Baucus remains the problem. The Democrats should roll over him. I’ll be shocked if they do.
It’s a sign of the times when the Orthodox Union starts taking its cues from the Certified Organic crowd. After 2000 years of formalized Jewish dietary law, Israel’s top Rabbi has threatened to revoke the kosher status of vegetables deemed excessively sprayed.
Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, the country’s top religious authority, said he would yank veggies’ blanket kosher seal of approval over “insane quantities” of insecticides. Although even the man with the plan acknowledged that there is no precedent for decertifying fruits and vegetables, he said that health hazards alone make spraying a religious concern. (Kashrut, the body of law dictating what is and isn’t kosher, forbids eating any known poison.) dictating what is and isn’t kosher, forbids eating any known poison.)
Indeed.
(For those who don’t get the reference in the title, you’re SOL. I couldn’t find a link on the innertubes. Sixties commercial for Levi’s bread, as I recall.)
Betsy McCaughey has popped up before this year, claiming that the stimulus package included funding for comparative effectiveness research, which would “have the government essentially dictate treatments.” It played into the worst fears, stoked for years by conservatives, of the government running health care and “getting between you and your doctor,” unlike the great system we have now, where an insurance company bureaucrat does that. It’s the same strategy as trying to get Americans to fear the Canadian health care system, even though the opposite is closer to reality.
It must be fun to be McCaughey, as her entire job appears to be misreading Congressional legislation and writing columns about it. This is what she did in 1994, writing the seminal piece “No Exit” in The New Republic, filled with distortions about the Clinton health care plan, that set the conventional wisdom against it. She’s like an inverse I.F. Stone, ferreting out government malfeasance where none exists. The difference, of course, is that McCaughey is funded by powerful interests: she sits on the board of directors of a medical device company, has received stock options from that same company, and is part of a think tank funded by pharmaceuticals. So she’s well-compensated for her deliberate misreadings.
The most recent installment, playing out over a number of days, is her contention that the House health care bill “would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.” Once again, she plays into the usual conservative tropes with false attacks about government taking control of your life.
And these claims get the standard fact-checktreatment, and reporters try to pin her down, and McCaughey says things like “it doesn’t say that in so many words, but it would allow for it to happen in the future,” and eventhe President has to go ahead and rebut this in a town hall:
Q I have heard lots of rumors going around about this new plan, and I hope that the people that are going to vote on this is going to read every single page there. I have been told there is a clause in there that everyone that’s Medicare age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to die. This bothers me greatly and I’d like for you to promise me that this is not in this bill.
THE PRESIDENT: You know, I guarantee you, first of all, we just don’t have enough government workers to send to talk to everybody, to find out how they want to die.
I think that the only thing that may have been proposed in some of the bills — and I actually think this is a good thing — is that it makes it easier for people to fill out a living will.
Now, Mary, you may be familiar with the principle behind a living will, but it basically is something that my grandmother — who, you may have heard, recently passed away — it gave her some control ahead of time, so that she could say, for example, if she had a terminal illness, did she want extraordinary measures even if, for example, her brain waves were no longer functioning; or did she want just to be left alone. That gives her some decision-making power over the process.
The problem is right now most of us don’t give direction to our family members and so when we get really badly sick, sadly enough, nobody is there to make the decisions. And then the doctor, who doesn’t know what you might have preferred, they’re making decisions, in consultation with your kids or your grandkids, and nobody knows what you would have preferred.
So I think the idea there is to simply make sure that a living will process is easier for people — it doesn’t require you to hire a lawyer or to take up a lot of time. But everything is going to be up to you. And if you don’t want to fill out a living will, you don’t have to. But it’s actually a useful tool I think for a lot of families to make sure that if, heaven forbid, you contract a terminal illness, that you are somebody who is able to control this process in a dignified way that is true to your faith and true to how you think that end-of-life process should proceed.
You don’t want somebody else making those decisions for you. So I actually think it’s a good idea to have a living will. I’d encourage everybody to get one. I have one. Michelle has one. And we hope we don’t have to use it for a long time, but I think it’s something that is sensible.
But, Mary, I just want to be clear: Nobody is going to be knocking on your door; nobody is going to be telling you you’ve got to fill one out. And certainly nobody is going to be forcing you to make a set of decisions on end-of-life care based on some bureaucratic law in Washington.
And that’s that! Whew, we dodged a bullet there!
Except House Republicans will continue to pronounce that Obama wants to kill old people. And not just the rank and file, but the Minority Leader. And Democrats still get the cards and letters about how that nice Ms. McCaughey tells them that government agents will descend on their house with some rope and a pillow good enough for suffocatin’:
But Representative G. K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, said he heard many expressions of concern from constituents when he answered telephone calls to his office on Tuesday.
“The longer we wait to vote,” Mr. Butterfield said, “the more opportunity our opponents have to put out false messages. Seniors fear they will lose Medicare. They worry they will have to discuss plans for end-of-life care every five years.” […]
The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.”
Representative Robert E. Andrews, Democrat of New Jersey, said, “I have met seniors who think their Medicare will be taken away, which is false.”
So this is the game. McCaughey gets on conservative media, pretends to be an expert about all things health care, and just makes shit up about the bill. This lays a near-impossible trap for anyone who cares about honesty – leave the claims alone and watch them fester, or debunk them and give them even more attention. If you’re Politico, and your core mission is to start controversy, you can achieve a two-fer by printing headlines like “Will proposal promote euthanasia? and debunking the story deeper inside the article.
And yet it persists. Because the bullshit flies so fast that tamping it down is just an impossibility. John Thune yesterday went ahead and claimed that “most Americans” would pay 50 cents of every dollar in taxes under the health care bill. You can blame corporate media for failing to get out in front of the nonsense, but you’re not going to get Fred Thompson’s radio show, which is where this latest McCaughey smear originated, to value the truth.
The strategy of delay from those who want to kill the health care plan relies on a steady stream of bullshit from all areas of the conservative noise machine. Some of this opposition gets privileged by the media, some of it rebutted. But it’s all “out there.” And it has a cumulative effect, piece by piece, until the plan no longer seems worth doing (which, if it’s the Senate Finance Committee version, might be true). You have politicians literally arguing for speed in the process because they don’t want their opponents to have time to mainline more lies into the media bloodstream.
McCaughey won’t go away. And no matter how discredited Republicans get, their ability to find outlets for their bullshit will probably only grow. All of it goes back to a central argument about the nature of government, an argument that Democrats all too often don’t want to have. If the majority of people had any belief that government could act as a positive force in people’s lives, the barrage of lies would not matter nearly so much. If you never make that argument, you leave the field to people like Betsy McCaughey.
There’s a lot about the new Republican Party that’s mystifying. “Disarray” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I suppose it’s a lot like it was back in 1964, although I think even then you could see the outlines of a comeback — which they did, four short years later with the election of Nixon, the sainted Kennedy’s bete noir.
But this time, it’s really hard to see how they can ever build a sustainable majority when they are doing things like this:
Republicans’ dilemma in connecting with the growing Hispanic electorate will be on vivid display Tuesday: GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote overwhelmingly against confirming Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latino nominee to the Supreme Court. And the Democratic Party chairman will address the nation’s largest Latino political group — partly in Spanish. No national GOP official is speaking. Only one of the seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee has said he will support Sotomayor during Tuesday’s vote. Most have said they will vote against her, including the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Barack Obama won handily among Hispanics in November, and Republican strategists realize the party has little hope of winning a national election without a dramatic improvement among that growing voter group. It’s an especially important target in the Mountain West, which is becoming a key to the presidency.
It should have been obvious that this was happening when immigration reform was sunk by radio gasbag activism. The loathing of Hispanics runs as deeply among the hard core true believers as the loathing of blacks. (And it has a “respectable” outlet in the illegal alien debate.) These people’s lives are organized along racial and ethnic lines and they find solace and solidarity in their shared bigotry. It’s not something that’s easy to finesse at this point. The cowboy who likes Mexican food model seems to have run out of steam. Of course, they only need 51%, as pat Buchanan says every day on MSNBC, so the idea that they can cobble enough malcontents together to win a national election is certainly possible. But a sustainable majority is going to prove to be elusive if they can’t get past this even enough to pay lip service to diversity. It’s hard to believe they aren’t even trying, but when Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck are basically running the party, I suppose it’s inevitable.
Update: Hah! I just clicked over to Greenwald and found out that on the very same web-site today — Politico — you can read all about how the GOP is resurgent! Damn they’re good.
Here comes the part of the health care debate where people start to talk themselves into half a loaf instead of fighting for a full one.
There are many themes in the sad and frustrating history of health-care reform. But one of the central ones is that there were many points when Democrats could have accepted a compromise and did not. Richard Nixon, for instance, proposed a plan that could have passed Congress but that liberals thought comically inadequate. It was more comprehensive than anything we will get this year. George H.W. Bush also offered a pretty good proposal but got no support among Democrats.
Opportunities at health-care reform do not happen frequently. The average between major attempts is 19.5 years. That’s 19.5 years in which the uninsured stay uninsured and their ranks grow. Where a situation that is already bad gets a lot worse. This year, Barack Obama is popular, and there are 60 Democrats in the Senate and huge majorities in the House. There is no reason to believe that Democrats will be in a stronger position anytime soon. It is not like when a weakened Nixon, or a fading Bush, offered a compromise.
If reformers cannot pass a strong health-care reform bill now, there is no reason to believe they will be able to do it later. The question is whether the knowledge that the system will not let you solve this problem should prevent you from doing what you can to improve it. Put more sharply, the question should be whether this bill is better or worse than another 19.5 years of the deteriorating status quo.
Ezra Klein is not an activist. He’s a health care policy wonk. And he knows that we have a very broken political system and a media that gives wide latitude to out and out lies from conservatives. So he reasons that health insurance reform that gives access to coverage to 40 million Americans who don’t have it will be a major improvement for many Americans, and even if that’s seen as a loss in the political world, it’s worth achieving. Heck, if we get community rating, forcing insurers to cover everyone with the same coverage at the same basic rate, even a jury-rigged system can be universal.
This hardly solves every problem. In particular, it doesn’t do much to rein in costs. But if you combine (a) Medicare, (b) our current employer-based insurance regime, and (c) community rating along with subsidies for low-income families, you’ve essentially institutionalized universal healthcare insurance. Not everyone will take advantage of it — there will always be a few people who go without coverage even if it’s affordable — and you still a need a few other things like out-of-pocket caps. Still, it’s basically a statement that everyone in the country can and should be covered. And once that becomes a cultural norm, it will never go away.
If we end up with health insurance reform, where you have to be covered, cannot be dropped, and must pay the same rate regardless of prior conditions, and you have an exchange to buy insurance instead of being forced into a regional monopoly, people in the individual market will see the difference. Of course, problems will remain. Employers, without a mandate, will still drop coverage. The costs will continue to soar, especially without a public option that can gain a big enough following to force competition in that individual marketplace, particularly on price. The smaller tweaks of health IT and prevention and comparative effectiveness are important but may end up compromised. And without getting the real savings from stakeholders necessary to drive down costs, people may still see their premiums rise. Not to mention the fact that we’re going to need millions more doctors.
The reason that liberals want to enshrine a public option, not the weak co-op alternative, is that the history of the few victories in health care and the social safety net in this country started with an incomplete toehold that gets expanded over time. Medicare wasn’t perfect at the start. Or SCHIP. Or Social Security. They needed to be tweaked and improved and made useful for all. I don’t think it’s possible for co-ops to scale up in this way. We’ve seen the history of them taking decades to have any measurable effect.
“We think the public option is very important,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., but “we have to see what the Senate does on co-ops, and see how it’s formulated, to see whether or not it would have a similar effect.”
“It’s really premature for me to lay out what should be in this bill,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., when he was asked about the public option […]
Liberals shudder at the idea of removing a public option.
“There are rumors that the leadership is getting squishy” on the public option, said Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which also is trying to write a version of health care legislation.
“Some of us have pushed back hard and said we will not support a bill if it doesn’t have a public option,” he warned. “There comes a point where some of us will say getting a bill out at any cost is not a panacea if it’s a bad bill.”
When Harry Reid comes out and says what can get 60 votes beats what I want, you understand that he’s laying the groundwork. This is why health insurance stocks shot up yesterday. The insurers are on the verge of getting a forced market, lowering their administrative costs (no rescission department) and adding tens of millions to the rolls.
And the other thing that we do want to do — now, this is controversial, and I understand some people are worried about this — we do think that it makes sense to have a public option alongside the private option. So you could still choose a private insurer, but we’d also have a public plan that you could choose from that would be non-for-profit, wouldn’t have, hopefully, some of the same high administrative costs, and would be potentially more responsive to your needs at a lower cost. I think that helps keep the insurance companies honest because now they have somebody to compete with.
And I have to say, the reason this has been controversial is a lot of people have heard this phrase “socialized medicine” and they say, we don’t want government-run health care; we don’t want a Canadian-style plan. Nobody is talking about that. We’re saying, let’s give you a choice. You can choose the private marketplace, or this other approach.
And I got a letter the other day from a woman; she said, I don’t want government-run health care, I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare. (Laughter.) And I wanted to say, well, I mean, that’s what Medicare is, is it’s a government-run health care plan that people are very happy with. But I think that we’ve been so accustomed to hearing those phrases that sometimes we can’t sort out the myth from the reality.
Nothing abut co-ops, but the move, one assumes, would be to sell co-ops as the public plan. Obama’s stated strategy has been to get to conference and make the necessary adjustments at that time.
We’ll see if that results in a toehold for transforming the health care system, or an insurance industry bailout.
Chris Hayes homes in on one of my ongoing frustrations about the health care debate:
In its healthcare messaging, the White House has taken an issue more intimate and immediate than perhaps any other in a voter’s life and transformed it into an abstract, technical argument about long-term actuarial projections. It’s a peculiar kind of reverse political alchemy: transforming gold into lead. Of course, there’s a certain logic to the White House approach: despite widespread public support for reforming the healthcare system, a desire for more choices and pervasive insecurity about the stability of coverage, a majority of people think that their health insurance is just fine. The trick then is to promise two contradictory things: that healthcare reform will change the system while leaving your healthcare intact. In what at first appeared a deft bit of jujitsu, the White House settled on the long-run-cost argument as the way to pull this off. But now we’re seeing the problems with this approach. For one, converting a moral and political argument into a technical and accounting one ends up ceding veto power to the accountants at the Congressional Budget Office. In a Beltway version of Revenge of the Nerds, every time a Democratic bill comes out of committee it’s sent to the CBO to be “scored”–that is, to evaluate how much it will cost and how much it will “bend the curve” on future costs. So far, the results have been mixed. CBO head Doug Elmendorf has been skeptical about the gains to be had from measures like health IT and wellness programs, and both the House and Senate bills have been scored as revenue neutral over the next ten years. In another context that would be great news, but since healthcare is being sold as a way to reduce the deficit, revenue neutral doesn’t quite cut it. The other problem is broader than just these pieces of legislation. Obama has inherited a shared political vocabulary in Washington (with phrases like “fiscal discipline,” which he himself employs) that shapes the contours of the possible and semantically militates against progressive politics at every invocation. If “fiscal discipline” meant that politicians support tax increases on the wealthy or cuts to the military budget to pay for programs, it would be a useful concept. But what “fiscal discipline” means in Washington is cutting government. It means no taxing and no spending. It means “pain” and “sacrifice” and gutting the welfare state. When politicians say they’re “fiscally conservative,” what it actually means is they’re conservative. Full stop.
Yes. I saw this coming back in January when I first wrote about this after watching Andrea Mitchell lay down the village gauntlet:
MSNBC commentator: … The subtext of all of this [call to service] is “hey Americans, you’re gonna have to do your part too. There may be some sacrifices involved for you too.” Do you think he’s going to use his political capital to make those arguments and will it go beyond rhetoric?
Andrea Mitchell: It does go beyond rhetoric. He needs to engage the American people in this joint venture. That’s part of the call. That’s part of what he needs to accomplish in his speech and in the days following the speech. He needs to make people feel that this is their venture as well and that people are going to need to be more patient and have to contribute and that there will have to be some sacrifice.
And certainly, if he is serious about what he told the Washington Post last week, that he wants to take on entitlement reform, there will be greater sacrifice required from a nation already suffering from economic crisis — to ask people to take a look at their health care and their other entitlements and realize that for the long term health and vitality of the country we’re going to have to give up something that we already enjoy.
[…]
It’s possible that they want to position health care reform as “entitlement reform,” but I do not think it will work. The forces that want to destroy the safety net are influential and well funded and they are selling entitlement “reform” in just the way that Andrea Mitchell describes — as something the American people must give up in order to set the country on the right course. They will not sit still while someone tries to sell it as anything other than necessary cuts in benefits or complete elimination of the programs. That’s the whole point.
Later, when they put together the health care and fiscal responsibility summits, (and were reportedly anxious to give Pete Peterson a big role until liberals had fit) it was clear that they were in thrall to the fiscal scolds and had decided that they needed to sell virtually everything as being in some way a path to a balanced budget. That decision has guided the messaging to one degree or another ever since, and as Hayes points out, has left them at the mercy of every half baked projection that shows that health care reform won’t immediately save the government any money (even if it will end up saving the nation vast sums of money in the long run.)
That they chose this course is a symptom of the ongoing Democratic capitulation to conservative propaganda, to be sure. But as a very smart friend of mine pointed out recently, it’s also something that a lot of elected Democrats actually believe. They really do think it’s more important to balance the budget as soon as possible than it is to ensure that all Americans have health care. And as Hayes points out, that makes them conservatives.
The funny thing is that the last guy who actually balanced the budget was another Democrat who failed to pass comprehensive health reform and instead left a substantial surplus — which the Republicans gave away to the wealthy at the first opportunity and then proceeded to borrow trillions to pay for a completely unnecessary war and enrich their contributors even more. You would have thought that after that the Democrats would feel a little foolish for being the drudges who actually do the dirty work of “fiscal responsibility” and get called tax and spend liberals for their troubles. But here we are again. It’s as if we went to sleep in 1994 and woke up today as far as the rhetoric is concerned.
Of course, the Democrats are well compensated for their willingness to be the goats so perhaps that makes the bitter medicine go down a little easier. They play the same role over and over so it’s a little hard to believe they aren’t aware of what they’re doing.